What We Cannot See by Louise Hughes
Content warnings
Suicide. Bereavement. Grief.
In Rena’s garden, beside the leaning fence, grew a tree as tall as the house was long. With silvery bark and pale, thin leaves, it sheltered summer flowers and watched them sleep through winter. It shook off snow. It braced against the east wind.
Until one day, its leaves began to yellow, its bark to crack, its branches to splinter. Rena ignored it at first because trees were fickle things, growing when or where they will. The changes were slow and she, seeing the tree every day, chose to imagine they were small.
When her neighbour, Palla, came to call with two jars of marmalade, she nodded towards it. “You should ask the tree charmer to look at that, when he comes around.”
But because Rena had heard nothing but what she should and should not do the last few months, she smiled, took the jam, and tucked it to the back of the shelf. Marmalade, so bitter, had never been her favourite. That was her daughter Liese and Liese was gone and Palla should have known that.
Liese departed the world by her own choice, eight months before the tree began to wither.
One spring morning, Rena came outside with the washing basket to find the tree’s lowest branch lying among the daffodils, torn from the trunk like a chunk of stale bread. The shock was new and sharp. It broke through the fog inside her.
That was when she looked at it properly.
A feeling of dread took root inside her, standing beneath the tree’s new leaves, seeing where they were turning brown and curling up. Could this tree, not so long ago a sapling, really be dying? Would it need the feller’s axe? Already? By the goddess, no.
Rena pegged her washing out, shaking her head and trying not to think about it, even as the weight sat heavy in the pit of her stomach. First Liese, so young, so bright, and now, just when she was starting to turn her face to the sun again, to see the world without feeling that chill. Now the tree, whose shape against the empty white sky had brought her comfort, was giving up.
“How dare you!” she shouted at it before slamming the door.
She spent the rest of the morning with one eye out of the back window, dragging around her worries like the taste of rot. Scrubbing the table, kneading the dough, cutting rhubarb into stalks for the children next door.
Liese never liked rhubarb. She would only be happy when the harvest apples came and she could sit with her school slate out in the garden, munching in the tree's shade.
The tree they’d planted long before Liese was born. Rena and the man who had once been her husband. His name erased itself from her mind as surely as his cap disappeared from the peg, leaving only an occasional whiff of pipe smoke. Liese was too much for him and Rena had never been quite enough.
Neither was anybody’s fault and neither had been known until the day he took his coat and went. Rena should have seen it, but she didn’t. Just like she should have seen whatever twisted itself around Liese’s heart, invisible on her face, in her eyes, but poisoning her veins. A sickness.
“The tree charmer is coming through next week, my sister said in her last letter. You should send for him.” Artur this time, when she stopped at his farm for milk. His cows chewed the cud in the field behind her garden.
What could a whistle-playing vagrant do for her? He couldn’t bring Liese back and without Liese, maybe she didn’t deserve the tree either. Maybe it was her punishment for not seeing what a mother should have seen.
Her daughter, sinking.
The despair she felt when she realised and all those weeks of trying to find something, anything, in her memories that could have been a sign. That was what changed her mind. She stood in the kitchen window and watched the tree, its branches lightly creaking in the breeze.
Panic bubbled in her chest. A tightness as she set the kettle on the fire and sank so deep into thought that it boiled dry. It wouldn't help. She knew that. A tree would live or die through something deep down within its roots, but when it did, she wanted to be able to say to herself, “I did everything I could.”
This time.
Rena sent next-door’s eldest for the tree charmer as soon as he got in from school. She’d only had Liese and now she had no-one. No-one to send on errands. No-one to stop her having to go out there and face them. People still looked at her sadly in the street and crossed over to avoid the smell of grief.
How could she not have known? She heard it in their looks.
When the knock sounded on the door, sooner than expected, just before noon the next day, Rena put on her clean apron and went to answer it, pulling herself up at the shoulders. It was blossom season. She thought the tree charmer would be up and down the hillside with his pipe.
A young woman with ivy in her braid stood on the path. Unexpected. Familiar.
“Mina?”
The tree charmer who had called around last year was an old man with a twisty beard and shaking fingers. This was Mina. Mina with the pipe strapped across her chest to show her trade.
“I finished my apprenticeship,” Mina said, quiet like the leaves. “Thank you for sending for me. I know you don't put more store in... our work.”
Rena never cared for the songs of travelling charmers. Trees were older and stranger than folk could possibly understand, but a new urgency drove her. She’d planted that tree what she was hopeful, bright as a silver sixpence, and now look at it.
When she didn't answer, Mina nodded. “Show me.”
They went into the garden and it was evident. Rena stood beneath the cracking branches, on which hung clumps of curled, dry leaves, and swallowed her regret. She should have done something earlier.
Mina put her hand to the trunk, plucked off a leaf, touched it to her tongue.
“Please,” she said. “Could I have a cup of tea?”
Rena understood. Mina needed to work alone, to preserve the magic of what she did, so Rena took herself back inside and put the kettle on. She glanced out to see the tree charmer, who she had last seen wading into the village pond, net in hand, with her skirts tucked into her drawers... six years ago, or seven. Mina sat cross-legged in the tree’s shadow, just like Liese used to do. Through the window Rena heard, in a breath of the wind, the tree charmer’s low song.
It reminded her of Liese humming to herself as she darned socks, cut carrots, fed the hens. Half-remembered chapel hymns, and the dips and dives of the May fiddle.
She put the teapot and the cups, and the jug of milk—stuck back together after Liese knocked it off the table telling a story about clouds—on a tray. She carried it out into the garden and set it down on the grass.
“Well?” her question was a shade too demanding, but Mina already knew what she thought, and Mina still looked like the little girl she’d been.
Trees did not have ears to hear or eyes to see. How could any person hope to reach them?
Mina plucked off a healthy leaf. Rena recoiled because the tree had so few to spare. Then the tree charmer dipped it into the cup of tea and sipped. There was a small slit in the trunk, cut with the silver knife that Mina had laid on the ground. Sap oozed. Mina rubbed it between her fingers.
“I can't find a sickness,” Mina said. She sat down again, between the roots, barefoot. She’d left her sandals on the step.
Rena closed her eyes and nodded. “I understand. Thank you for...”
“Oh, no, there’s something here. I feel it.” She set the cup aside, picked up her knife again and started to dig. She cleared the earth, reached down with nimble fingers to find the root. Sliced again.
Rena couldn't watch. She took her pruning knife and went to the roses. Liese had never cared much for roses. Too big, too bold, too smelly. She liked the carpet of bluebells along the fence and the carpet of cherry blossom after a storm.
She took the flowers inside, found a dusty vase, and set about arranging. But however she moved, pulled out, re-positioned, she couldn’t get the thing to look quite right.
The house was cold. Empty. Full of dust she couldn't be bothered to sweep away. Perhaps she just needed to be elsewhere and the tree was trying to tell her so. Leave, it whispered in the night. Leave it creaked with the dawn. Leave.
"So," Mina announced her presence quietly. "Your tree is grieving. It misses your... it misses Liese."
They were about the same age. Liese and Mina. Friends, once. Until Mina had taken on her apprenticeship and slipped away. Like many childhood friends are wont to do. Vanishing between the moment, not thought about again for years.
One piece in a puzzle that would never be complete.
Rena pulled herself together as best she could, rubbing the threat of tears away. Not in front of a girl she'd scolded once for stealing strawberries. “Liese has been gone for ten months. This only started recently.”
She met Mina’s eyes with all the strength she had. Had she failed to notice again? Had the tree been dying all that time?
No. It was a tree. It didn't care about the people that fluttered through its life.
Mina came to sit down, reaching out for Rena's twisting hands. “I'm sorry, but trees are used to chattering birds, who come and go with the season. They leave with the first chill wind, when the light fades, and...”
The tree was an ache inside her chest. Its roots not just beneath the ground. If a wizened man with a faraway accent had told her such strangeness, she would have thrown him out of the door with a curse in his ear.
But this was Mina. She knew Mina. Mina was a girl who didn't know how to lie even when she should. She was a child of the same orchards and lanes as Liese, and as Rena. “It thought she would come back...?”
“...And tell stories of the people and places she'd seen while her voice was away.”
There it was. The deep down pull. The never-ending, yawning sadness of a hole in the world. Rena wanted to be strong in front of this girl who had been no higher than her hip just yesterday, but her veil of strength shivered.
There were trees along the field-side path, on the village green, clinging to the hillside, that were Rena's trees. They had been there since her childhood and she counted them out in winter and back to leaf in spring.
But that tree? That was Liese’s tree. Once she was in the world, it grew faster even than she did. If there was a single memory of her daughter that she wanted to preserve, it would be of Liese, sitting with her school slate in the golden, early summer sun, between the roots.
“Will it die?”
She didn’t think she could stand that. Not again.
But Mina managed the smallest smile. It wasn’t like the smiles that met her around every corner since Liese took the belladonna from the topmost shelf, boiled the kettle, drank the tea. It wasn’t sympathetic, or pitying, or forced. It was knowing. It was sure.
“It misses her and it misses her stories. You need to speak to it.”
Liese at six years old, dancing and prattling around the tree, spinning hands and words. Liese at twelve, sitting in the crook of its roots, still and steady. Liese, at fourteen, curled on the earth and weeping as her heart broke for the first time.
The only time.
Oh, Liese. Rena’s chair flew back. She crossed the garden path in a rush of tears. She stumbled in her hurry and the tree caught her, and it was the first time she had touched its bark since Liese went into the ground.
Rena pounded her fists against it, as if she could fell it herself, with the pure force of her anger. “You let her die,” she screamed up into its branches. No birds took flight. No leaves stirred. Silence. Only silence. “You didn’t help her. You didn’t keep her safe.”
A hand on her shoulder went through her like a shot. Mina, pulling her back. “It's a tree. Remember that. There’s only so much it, or you, could ever have done. Saving her was not within its power.”
Of course, for Liese had gone in winter, when the tree was distant, quiet, and the air too cold for sitting out beneath its branches. When had she last spoken to it? In the autumn, when the leaves began to gather? When she ventured out in the snow? Too old for snowmen, but resolved to build one regardless, as if she’d known it would be the last deep fall she would ever see.
For the tree, Liese faded away as the nights pulled in and returned when they slipped out again.
Mina tucked her pipe back into its strap, bowed her head, took her leave. She didn't ask for payment and Rena stayed out there on the grass as the night began to creep in.
“I'm sorry,” she breathed. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”
They had been three. Rena, Liese, and the tree that watched over them through the darkest winter storm.
And now they were two.
And Rena told the tree of the day she had come home to the quiet that never left, of all the long winter since, and how she wished she'd known.
And the tree heard her, and they both knew, that some things were just impossible to see.
Louise Hughes
Louise Hughes is a writer and time traveller from the north-east of England, with stories in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, and more.